Pick-up – Is It Easier for Girls?

I thought I would start with an interesting scenario that was posted in a similar thread on the VA forum. I was going to post this there, but I didn’t want to derail a thread intended for answers from someone else with my own opinion, so I made this thread instead.

Take an average guy and an average girl. Put them both in the same bar which is composed 50/50 of guys and girls of all levels.Now have each one of them raise their hand and shout “Who wants to have sex with me tonight?”The girl will have a line. The guy will not.

At first glance, it seems pretty easy to assume that this is true. But upon closer inspection, we can see that this really isn’t the case.

First of all, even if you put all the other issues that women have to deal with in the dating scene (we’ll get to those in a minute) aside and had a women stand in the middle of a bar and shout “Hey, who wants to fuck?” there would be, in reality, surprisingly few takers.

Think about what would go on in the mind of the average man. This is a man who has been socially conditioned to think that women really don’t like sex that much, and that any women who seems to openly want to get laid must be a slut. Factor in that same socially conditioned fear of contracting an STD from such a person and you have already lost a large percentage of potential takers.

Now consider all the insecurities that most men suffer from. How many of those remaining men would be too insecure or paranoid to believe that this woman was REALLY just up for a quick lay and nothing more? How many would be so confused by the idea of a woman shouting to an entire bar that she needs to get laid that just the idea would freak them out too much to consider lining up? How many men would be too afraid to show their interest for fear of it all being a joke and getting rejected?

Suddenly, our list of potential takers comes down to either extremely confident men who understand that sometimes a girl just needs to get laid (of which there are really very few), or guys who will just fuck anything warm and squishy with two legs (and who wants that?). Not really an abundance of choice.

Now admittedly, this is a rather pessimistic view of this scenario, but when looking at things from a general sense, it is still a very realistic one.

Just think about it for a second: the idea of a woman just coming up to us and saying “Hey let’s fuck.” is so outside of most of our realities that it would just freak us out too much. Despite all the bravado they would display if you presented them with the scenario, even most aspiring PUAs would be so thrown off by the fact that it was actually happening that they would miss their chance.

I know this from personal experience.

There were several occasions during my transformation from AFC to PUA that an attractive woman would show obvious interest in me and I would blow it. The idea that an attractive woman was so interested in me that she wanted to have sex with me – without me really having to do anything – was so outside of my reality that I didn’t believe it was happening. My insecurities would take over and I would have no idea what to do and eventually botch the whole thing. And I was an aspiring PUA! I should have known better! How is the average guy going to react?

I have seen this same reaction countless times with students and wingmen in the field, as well as with AFC friends and acquaintances: too much interest will freak them out and they will eject.

These are only the factors that affect that special scenario. The reality of the dating scene is much more complicated. The scenario itself is faulty because it almost never happens. And the reasons why this almost never happens are quite related to why I believe it’s impossible to gauge whether or not picking up is easier for men or women:

They are simply different sets of problems.

We find it easy to say that women have it easier because men are always up for sex, so they should never have any problem getting laid. And on paper that may be true: it would be easier for a girl to get a guy into bed than it would be for the guy if the situation was reversed.

The problem with this is idea is that we’re only looking at the kinds of problems that men have to deal with in the dating world. Women have a whole slew of completely different problems that they have to contend with while they’re out trying to get laid. They may have advantages where we do not in this area, but they are hindered by things which the average man doesn’t even consider.

First, you have the external issues:

There are the insecurities and social conditioning of the men that the average woman wants to sleep with, which I illustrated above.

Then there is this whole concept of a “slut”. If a woman shows too much sexual interest too quickly she could freak the guy out or accidentally make him think that she’s a slut, neither of which are good for her. A reputation as a slut could ruin a woman in a limited population.

You have to consider how such a label can affect how she’s viewed within her peer group. A woman who is considered to be “giving it up too easily” suddenly becomes a threat to the replication value of everyone else in the group. This usually leads to more unfounded (or at least grossly exaggerated) rumors spreading around. I myself have seen absolutely horrid and completely untrue rumors spring up around a woman just because slept with a guy too quickly.

I have seen a woman who has had only two boyfriends in her entire life have one one-night-stand with a guy, and then suddenly there’s rumors floating around the next day that she’s a huge slut and had a foursome with this guy and two of his friends and that she’s got herpes and all sorts of other diseases. Granted, this is a pretty extreme example, but things like this happen more often than the average man tends to think. Anyone who has spent a lot of time with women knows how catty they can be with one another, and some men can be even worse.

A man only needs to be primarily concerned with his social value in the realms of preselection, dominance, access to resources, etc, while a woman has to worry about how forward she is being, whether or not she is dressed too slutty, and whether or not her behavior will be interpreted badly by her peer group. These may or not be harder issues to deal with. It’s hard to say, really. They are simply different sets of problems.

Then you have the internal issues:

A woman has a set of neurological circuitry that can really make it difficult for her to just get out there and get laid. Things like the Anti-Slut Defense, which is a hard-wired mechanism for preventing the loss of perceived replication value, are an example of this, as are the Last Minute Resistance circuits which are hard-wired to prevent a woman from becoming pregnant with a man who may not stick around to take care of her young. But there are also those feelings of guilt or “dirtiness” that are ingrained into some women by they mothers when they are very young, which make it very hard for them to be sexually active without feeling guilty about doing so.

Most of these have been discussed ad nauseum, so I wont go into detail about them here. I just want to note that they are important factors.

Most men don’t have to deal with any of these problems. Our issues in this category fall in the realms of approach anxiety, building attraction, and so on, while theirs fall under ASD, LMR, and the like. I think this is where you can see the differences between both sexes? problems most clearly:

Practically speaking, a reasonably attractive woman will have little trouble approaching a man and making him attracted to her, while for a man to do the same is MUCH harder (as I’m sure most of us are aware). But conversely, a man will internally have no trouble going through with the actual act of having sex, whereas a woman has to overcome many internal hurdles before she can get down to it.

And then there are the men themselves.

Most of us will never know what it’s like to be with a partner who is bigger and stronger than us. Most of us never have to worry about being afraid for our physical safety because of our partners. We know that when trying to choose a sexual partner, a woman has to screen for a man with healthy emotions, and who will protect them should they become endangered. This is because, among other things, we men can be very scary sometimes.

As men, we don’t have to worry about whether the person we just invited into our home is going to rape us. We don’t have to be concerned about whether they will hurt us if we have second thoughts or resist their escalation in any way. For men, the average psycho or stalker that we find ourselves mixed up with is an annoyance and little more. For women, they represent a significant risk to health and safety.

A woman has to take all of these factors into account when playing the field. If she doesn’t deal with these problems, then she can find herself in a world of trouble. Yes, it may be easier for a woman to attract a man, but is it the man she wants? Is she going to be safe around him? Are people going to think she’s a slut for sleeping with him? Is she emotionally comfortable with sleeping with him?

These are all very real problems that a woman has to deal with when courting a man. And it’s because these problems exist that we have invented tactics and methods to make things easier for a woman to sleep with us. We teach men to be understanding, non-judgmental and discreet where necessary, to convey healthy emotions and a genuine connection to our partner, to provide plausible deniability, and quite simply to not be creepy and scary.

If women did not have these problems, then we would not need to teach any of that.

Sure, it may be easier for a woman to attract a man, but when it comes down to actually picking a man up, both men and women suffer from very different sets of obstacles that they must overcome. This is what I mean when I say that you have to look at the bigger picture. There are many things in the act of picking up which either sex will find easy or difficult. But they are too different to measure up against one another. To try to quantify these issues accurately and compare them would be impossible.

As I said before: it’s neither harder nor easier, it’s just different.